New Zealand mountain granted same legal rights as a person
A mountain in New Zealand has been granted the same legal rights as a person, becoming the third natural feature in the country to be recognised as an individual.
Mount Taranaki – now known as Taranaki Maunga, its Maori name – is considered an ancestral being by indigenous people.
The pristine, snow-capped dormant volcano is the second highest on New Zealand’s North Island at 8,261ft and a popular spot for tourism, hiking and snow sports.
It comes alongside a move to rename the mountain from Mt Egerton to its original Maori name of Te Papa-Kura-o-Taranaki (meaning the highly regarded and treasured lands of Taranaki), with the highest peak named Taranaki Maunga.
The ruling acknowledges the mountain’s theft from the Maori of the Taranaki region after New Zealand was colonised, and fulfils an agreement of redress from the country’s government to indigenous people for harms perpetrated against the land since.
The newly-passed law gives Taranaki Maunga all the rights, powers, duties, responsibilities and liabilities of a person.
Its legal personality has a name: Te Kahui Tupua, which the law views as ‘a living and indivisible whole’.
It includes Taranaki and its surrounding peaks and land, ‘incorporating all their physical and metaphysical elements’, which means the park will effectively own itself.
In practice, a newly created public body will be ‘the face and voice’ of the mountain, comprised of four members from local Maori iwi, or tribes, and four members appointed by the country’s conservation minister.
Lead negotiator Jamie Tuuta said legal personhood recognised in law what the people of Taranaki have always known.
‘So our worldview is our maunga are ancestors, they’re not resources but they are living beings and so the notion of legal personhood fits well with our worldview,’ he said.
‘It actually speaks to what was envisaged I think in The Treaty of Waitangi- both iwi and the Crown working in partnership and so that’s what it is. It’s very much a co-governance model where iwi and the Crown look to work collaboratively first and foremost for the health and wellbeing of the maunga.’
Debbie Ngarewa-Packer, a co-leader of the political party Te Pāti Māori and a descendant of the Taranaki tribes, said the decision marked the end of a long journey.
‘Today, Taranaki, our maunga, our maunga tupuna, is released from the shackles, the shackles of injustice, of ignorance, of hate,’ she told the country’s parliament.
‘We grew up knowing there was nothing anyone could do to make us any less connected,’ she added.
The mountain’s legal rights are intended to uphold its health and wellbeing. They will be employed to stop forced sales, restore its traditional uses and allow conservation work to protect the native wildlife that flourishes there. Public access will remain.
New Zealand was the first country in the world to recognise natural features as people when a law passed in 2014 granted personhood to Te Urewera, a vast native forest on the North Island. Government ownership ceased and the tribe Tuhoe became its guardian.
In 2017, New Zealand recognised the Whanganui River as human, as part of a settlement with its local iwi.
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